5 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and the City

We can think up pretty much any excuse to revisit Sex and the City—whether it’s appreciating the show’s best truisms about agingor revealing our secret single behavior. But next week, there’s an actual cause for celebration: the 18th anniversary of the very first episode. We couldn’t help but wonder: What did we really know about the beloved HBO show? Well, mix yourself a cosmo—here, five things you likely didn’t know about Sex and the City.

1. Despite the show’s love of high fashion, there were quite a few flea market finds on Sex and the City. The iconic tutu Sarah Jessica Parker wore during the opening credits was actually fished out of a bargain bin for $5. According to the show’s stylist, Patricia Field, it was a somewhat spur-of-the-moment decision. “I was in a showroom and there was a bucket on the floor for, like, $5 each, and I pull out this tulle skirt, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know, let’s just take this,’ ” she has said. Carrie’s bathroom mirror was the other surprise find, and it has a bit of a serendipitous origin story: Parker and husband Matthew Broderick were eyeing the very same vanity for their own home, but decided to pass. Later, she returned to the shop, but the vendor told her it was sold to “some show.” Suffice it to say, Parker was quite surprised to see it in Carrie’s bathroom. “She freaked out when she saw it on our set,” production designer Jeremy Conway has said.

2. Kim Cattrall turned down the role of Samantha three times. “I’d read the book and threw it across the room because I found it so depressing,” Cattrall once said. “Then I was offered the part, read it again, and still didn’t think it was for me. I just didn’t care for the characters. It was only after numerous meetings that they convinced me Samantha wasn’t a silly two-dimensional character and I finally said yes.” Lou Thornton was actually first cast as Samantha, but creator Darren Star ultimately wanted someone older in the role. “The problem was that [Thornton] was in her 30s, I think,” Star said. “And it was changing who Samantha was. Samantha was 10 years older than the other girls, a totally different experience.”

3. Carrie had quite a number of suitors on Sex and the City, but Parker was actually set up with one cast member in real life. Are you sitting down? More than a decade before the show aired, Parker went out on a blind date with Willie Garson, who played Stanford Blatch, Carrie’s gay best friend. “I’ve known Sarah for 15 years—we were set up once, had a very long flirtation, and then just settled into being best friends, something I think really reads on the show,” Garson once said. “It’s funny, she’s said in interviews that every single one of her friends is gay ‘except for Willie Garson.’ ”

4. Every Sex and the City devotee knows that Carrie’s heart really belongs to her shoes. But wearing sky-high Manolos for hours on end, which Parker did throughout the duration of the series, actually took a significant toll on her feet. “For 10 or so years, I literally ran in heels,” Parker once said. “I worked 18-hour days and never took them off. I wore beautiful shoes, some better made than others, and never complained.” Later, when Parker went to the doctor, she realized just how much she had suffered for her shoes: “I went to a foot doctor and he said, ‘Your foot does things it shouldn’t be able to do. That bone there—you’ve created that bone. It doesn’t belong there.’ ”

5. As Carrie has told us in so many voice-overs, New York is just as much of a character on Sex and the City as the four female protagonists. But, as it turns out, our leading ladies’ apartment addresses didn’t actually exist in real life. While Carrie says her apartment is located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (245 East 73rd Street, to be exact), the real facade is located in the West Village. As you would probably imagine, the inside of the storied apartment differs from Carrie’s modest one-bedroom. (The apartment is 4,104 square feet andincludes six fireplaces and 10 rooms.) In 2012, the apartment sold to an anonymous buyer for $9.85 million; it sold again the following year for $13.25 million.